I’m gonna say some stuff that most of the people here probably know on some level, but considering this thread, I think it needs to be explicitly said.
Very few of the people who post comments on the internet are highly educated in whatever field they’re making a claim in. Getting challenged by people who know next to nothing and receive all the upvotes anyway is an exhausting experience, so many well-educated people keep their debates private. If they are here, you probably aren’t enough of an expert to recognize them. The simple, easy to understand takes are what get upvoted, and in-depth, nuanced ideas are almost always ignored or ridiculed. Most forums are full of people who know just enough to feel confident in making calls for radical action without any knowledge of how that action could be implemented or would play out.
Look through this comment section. Lots of vague, single-sentence arguments about being “capitalist,” “communist,” or “socialist,” along with “leftist,” “liberal,” or “conservative,” but I don’t see a single one acknowledging that each of those words can individually encompass vast groups of conflicting ideas and have wildly different meanings in different parts of the world; a serious problem considering at least a few of the people posting in this thread aren’t in the US. Very little discussion of substantive ideas like “people should be given a universal basic income of $15 a day,” or “food stamps should be granted without application to anyone under a certain income threshold,” or “social media servers should receive public funding and be administrated by an elected body.” It’s almost never more specific than “universal healthcare,” or “abolish the police,” Those might be the right direction, but when was the last time you saw people discussing things like whether experimental treatments should be covered, or the number and type of professions that should replace the current myriad of roles police are expected to fill? I seriously doubt if you randomly selected two self-described communists (or whatever ideology) on Lemmy and had them start making decisions together, that they would agree with each other on exactly how society should be run even half the time.
I’m not saying these conversations shouldn’t happen, vague as they are. I certainly don’t have the energy to write out long arguments 99% of the time. We all have to make our own way to finding deeper knowledge, and building a knowledge base of buzzwords can be a useful stepping stone. But far too often people stop once they feel they have a sufficient understanding of the buzzwords and then start talking like they know the answers. it’s important to temper the depth of your convictions based on where you’re having the discussion, where you’re getting your knowledge. Are you watching youtube videos and reading unsourced comments, or are you reading research papers from institutions with a history of making accurate claims? Are you reading news articles from ad-supported papers, and if you are, are you checking whether those articles are making sources available for readers check on? Should I have bothered writing several paragraphs under a meme of a glowing red bird, and am I really qualified to tell people to be more careful with their discussions?
I appreciated your wall of text! Lemmy, and social media in general, are pretty terrible places for nuanced discussion. The system is biased towards short and vauge posts. As you said though, they can be a good stepping stone.
There’s been more than one time that I’ve seen people arguing in a thread and decided I’d look up the topic to see who is right. In the end it doesn’t really matter what people in the thread were saying. It got me interested in the topic and I searched out more reputable sources of information and hopefully I learned a bit!
That being said, there are also threads where people post insane takes. You really need to have a litmus test for whether or not a post should even been considered.
Lemmy’s been a lot better than reddit for this in my experience. On reddit you couldn’t even get a sentence out.
Are you really qualified? Who knows, but you make a really good point
I really enjoyed reading this. Do you have a blog or something? Have a good one.
yes you can find it at /u/BlemboTheThird@lemmy.ca
To be taken seriously offline I necessarily have to make well reasoned and researched arguments.
Lemmy is where I come to blow off steam and just berate my ideological opponents because they genuinely are losers.
It is not a place for nuanced debate.
It is not a place for nuanced debate.
Why not? Compared to other social media it’s way better equipped for reasoned debate, with an easy-to-read layout designed for mountains of text and ease of linking sources. Maybe c/memes isn’t the right place but considering how serious the rest of this thread is I’m pretty sure my spiel was worth it.
Maybe the people in my social circle are just a lower caliber than yours, but I can’t remember the last time I got asked to source an opinion irl. Most of my friends already agree with me. Hell, offline, most people aren’t willing to discuss politics at all. Even saying you have opinions on politics is basically a faux pas…
Unless you’re a lib in the workplace then you can say whatever bullshit hot takes you want, since everyone will agree with you anyway.
The word “lib” is so vague now, that it has lost meaning.
Some people use it with the original meaning, but most just call anyone who isn’t right wing a lib.
Buzzwords, as the original commenter said.
Same for “right wing” and “fascist” and every other piece of shit insult ya’ll use in daily discourse.
It’s not a place for nuanced debate because I have no idea who I’m talking to.
I’d rather devote my time to having those nuanced conversations in real life (which I do) than trying to convince an American online through a meme community that gun bans would reduce school shootings for example.
If you actually have a group of peers that consistently challenge each other and have scholarly debate, congrats. You’re in a very small minority. You personally not having a use for arguing online doesn’t mean it’s useless. I know plenty of Americans who have been convinced that gun control is important by things they’ve seen online.
Very few people in this thread are kidding around. It’s worth pointing out that most of the things they are saying are extremely shallow.
Why should you only have discussions with people you know?
If you only have these discussions with people you know, more than likely, they are in your ideological bubble. You are just creating your own echo chamber. We may be randos on the internet, but we could be next to you on the subway or your cubicle. Most of us here probably like to debate somewhat.
I never said I only have discussions with people I know.
I actively have political conversations in real life on actual policy issues with a broad range of people.
Have you never campaigned before?
That’s not healthy.
just berate my ideological opponents because they genuinely are losers
Im astonished at how closed-minded and brainwashed you seem. Maybe actually think about why you would fight for a opinion that is not based on “well reasoned and researched arguments”… It really seems like youre arguing for another person’s opinion rather than having your own.
Lemmy isn’t “too extreme,” a very small subset of Lemmings are just fucking insufferable.
…have these people met certain redditors? 🧐
News: People on the internet find out some people on the internet grinds their gears
Tune in at 6 to hear our top story: “Water, is it really wet?”. Findings from top scientist may surprise you. 🤔
I’m still figuring out if I can just straight up block people from certain servers
Only individually
I mean, tankies are kinda worse.
Edit: seems this post is controversial! Let me clarify.
Tankies are definitely worse. 🥂
Meh, both extremes are as insufferable
No, they aren’t.
Tankies are mostly just delusional victims of troll farms.
Fascists are… fascists.
Fascists are… also delusional victims of Russian troll farms.
Honestly I find it kinda mindblowing how similar lemmygrad and hexbear are to /r/t_d.
They’re trying their darndest to drag the left into the mud. They’re pushing the same rhetoric as trumpers trying to brainwash young people Jordan Peterson style. The Russian government has a vested interest in destabilizing the US and trying to push people to violence and ‘revolt’ because that would take down the only threat to them. At least most of us aren’t so stupid to believe these people are in any way representing the left, the LGBT or minorities. I was looking for an LGBT friendly community and was so saddened to find out what it really was… trying to radicalize vulnerable groups. Shame on them. Fucking shame.
One is obnoxious, the other actively genocidal.
Considering them equally bad is a self report.
So we’re just pretending genocides weren’t committed by both sides?
No, I meant exactly what I said:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/insufferable
We were federated with them for a couple of days and their constant spam of insults and images makes them insufferable.
Fine, you find obnoxious dorks just as bad as genocidal fascists. I stand corrected.
From a governmental point of view, both extremes are responsible for multiple genocides so I’m not even sure which is which in your comment 🤔
And I’m talking about Lemmy’s tankies vs Reddit’s alt-right, since that’s what the conversation was about in the first place.
I think it’s just a symptom of “people”.
I see Roy I upvote
I actually hope more middle ground right leaning people migrate.
Why are people downvoting this? We know that’s necessary.
lol fat chance, keep dreaming idiot
See its this shit that drives me nuts.
How did you get so hateful. Same bafflement I get with hard right wing people. I figure its the same forces being applied
You have my respect.
…libs?
Lol yea maybe they’re just more libs
We call this the “Centrist pull” to get people to the right.
It’s like the carnival of flaming demon knife throwers insisting that throwing flaming chainsaws at your family every day is “extremism”, and just throwing knives at them is normal.
There is a lot of political and other “adult” discourse. Not extreme, but more exhausting for a person wanting memes, gifs, and lols. I imagine the median age here is higher than that of Reddit. Can’t confirm, but it certainly conducts itself with less…“juvenility”…or some word.
I find the political discourse, at least on some topics, very juvenile on Lemmy. You know, screeching about how billionaires aren’t people but parasites and need to die, hundreds of upvotes. That’s some edgy, frustrated teenager bullshit. Or at least it should be, guess some people never got the memo about inalienable rights, equal treatment, vigilantism and how two wrongs don’t make a right.
Seriously, this thirst for blood is disturbing and if it isn’t just venting then, well, look how the French Revolution turned on people. That wasn’t very poggers.
There’s also this idea that everybody who isn’t 100% on board needs to be defooed and marked, preferably as a fascist. Which plays into the hands of the actual fascists because the non-fascists hate each other too much to collectively tell them to fuck off, despite their differences.
There, that’s my venting done for today.
I wouldn’t say it’s leftist, though there’s a lot of leftists here. Lemmy is more like how internet discussion boards used to be. There’s a lot of people with weird opinions on things, and there’s no Reddit Karma pushing people to conform to the consensus. So people are going to have weird takes on things, and there’s not 1000 comments upvoted above the weird ones, so you’re going to see comments like that. So reply to with you your weird opinions on those weird comments.
Welcome to the version internet that’s not pre-packaged and filtered to be bland!
I don’t mind weird and different opinions on things. In fact, that’s what make the discussion interesting instead of some boring echo chambers. I just wish people wouldn’t be so aggressive about it and hurling personal attacks left and right. The old discussion board had thing called netiquete to keep the discussion civil, but here in certain communities it’s like the wild west.
Yeah… but that’s what the internet is. You’re connected to different people with different points of view, but you’re also connected to assholes. Just don’t take it personally, they don’t know you and you don’t know them.
Right? You can connect to assholes of that’s your thing, and I can connect to warm clams. No judging
Right? I’m just relieved, I can be myself here… I’ve said so many things here that would have gotten insta-ban on Reddit
Exactly. It’s not “Leftist”, it’s just NOT fully of Nazis, and that’s how far our standards have slipped.
Thats a huge downplay of what the actual Nazis did if you refer to right-leaning people as that.
Fuck leftists.
True. Reddit was pretty center-right oriented. Lemmy leans more left and I do enjoy seeing the Trumpers here getting dunked on pretty frequently.
Reddit was pretty center-right oriented.
lmao
Do you doubt that? What is your idea of the left? What is seen as ‘left’ or even what conservatives call ‘the radical left’ in the US would likely be seen as center or center-right globally.
Go on then, how would you describe it overall?
I haven’t seen any of that but I’ve seen a shit ton of owning the libs bullshit.
Why does everything need to be politicized? No one gives a flying fuck if you’re a leftist, unless you’re a Leftist and no one gives a fuck if you’re a right winger unless you’re a right winger. Jesus christ the US Politics are absolute fucking cancer.
This is the only answer
It’s considered ‘left’ to support queer and trans rights, and there are a good number of people that seem to have a problem with that whether my queer self is political or not.
Guaranteeing that every individual has the same rights independently of their sex, sexual orientation, race, skin color and so on… Shouldn’t be neither left nor right. It just should be. It’s just common sense.
There are plenty of another topic for the left vs right to debate. Leave identity politics out of it and just let people live like they want.
But like if people keep intentionally misgendering someone, trans people aren’t gonna wanna be in that environment. Those people will feel more safe here than reddit
Why does everything need to be politicized?
Because everything is political or adjacent to it. Everything in this world is either impacted by or is a reflection of politics.
I mention this to my friends all the time. So many issues we’re dealing with derives from politics, so of course discourse will always return to it.
Money Rent/housing costs Grocery costs Stagnant wages Retirement
School shootings Police brutality Systemic racism
Medicine Insurance R/d for treatments Quality of life
Etc. Etc.
School shootings Police brutality Systemic racism
Those are issues that are relevant in YOUR region so why do I have to discuss them? Politics are regional and Lemmy is a worldwide space. The majority of Lemmy is from outside of the USA, yeah we can talk a bit about US politics but not all the damn time.
My issue is that I’m trying to implement a new app in my home server. How is this political?
Cancer post, glad people are calling it out. Some of you need to get off the internet a bit more.
Please lead by example
In the marketplace of ideas, rightwing thoughts will be mocked, as they always should been…
Lemmy feels a lot more authentic to real life. If I started talking about tinfoil hat conspiracies, my friends would ridicule me to no end.
As they should.
Same here.
True, I’d expect pretty wild conspiracies like flat earth and chemtrails to be laughed at here, but a disturbing number of lemmings and even progressives in general follow a set of less outlandish - but more insidious - conspiracies that usually fall into the “collusion and malice” type. I could say that General Motors et al. killed most of the US passenger rail and streetcar systems, and most people here would accept that as a fact. Case closed, capitalism is evil and should be abolished, every bad thing is cause by someone with I’ll intentions making it worse.
I, however, tend to be suspicious of those sorts of takes in general. Returning to the alleged “streetcar conspiracy”I’ve actually done quite a lot of research into this and can decidedly say that the primary cause of the decline of mass transit in the US was… There were at least 5 primary causes, none of which were shadowy groups deliberately working to destroy it. Rather it was killed by a changing urban environment, failures to adapt to modal shifts, legacy streetcar systems just generally sucking, and local governments taking transit for granted and assuming that they can hold streetcar companies to exacting standards while expecting them to remain solvent, all while not considering it their problem.
I could go on, and can send some sources and references (maybe not direct links though) if you’d like to learn more. But my main point is that far too many people assume there’s a nefarious actor pulling the strings the whole time when it’s usually several factors lining up all the holes in the Swiss cheese and creating a negative externality we still talk about to this day.
There (usually) isn’t a conspiracy, and if there is it’s unlikely to be anywhere near as all-encompassing as you think. People say there is because it gives them someone to blame, helps channel their anger at something tangible, and just makes a good story.
If I start talking to random people in a bar odds are I won’t meet a single one who will start calling me a Nazi because I believe in the Uyghur genocide…
And there are no conservative ideas that aren’t tinfoil hat conspiracies, I guess
Honestly, this place is full of communists. I’m not the biggest fan of communists, to be frank. There is a lot of backwards ideas that get accepted as “leftist,” when they’re really statist. Particularly revisionist history statist. If a communist party said it, you gotta defend it kinda thing.
Define ‘full of communists’… cause it sounds like such an american phrase and perspective. To me, it’s just a more leftwing centered space. The real communists are a minority. At least on the biggest Lemmy servers.
Go for a walk in Hexbear and Lemmygrad communities, these are Lemmy’s communists…
Yeah but those instances are not nearly as big as lemmyworld and the others. I also didn’t say that there were no communists at all. There are just not as many as OP made it out to be.
I just checked and you’re instance isn’t federated with Hexbear so you don’t see their users’ comments, my instance was federated with them for a couple of days and it made the Lemmy experience a mess.
I have more than one account, none of them get many communist posts. Maybe there’s one in there in a few rare occasions but it’s not significant.
Lol I’m not crying “SOCIALISM!” because someone recommended taking care of poor people. And maybe it’s just the communities on lemm.ee, maybe it’s because I interact with the communities more because I can’t bite my tongue. But I come across way more communist communities than anything else. Your instance matters. I see a lot of communist communities. As an anarchist, the prevalence of communism on lemmy is troubling to me because I see huge flaws in the thinking and i want to see the left not follow down a doomed hierarchical road that has proven to be a failure over and over and over again.
deleted by creator
I don’t identify as a communist. I just don’t want life to be unreasonably difficult for people. Thats it. I just what the promise of what labor was supposed to be. I want it to free us from the shackles of work or die. Guess that is extreme left now even with tankies around the corner from us.
Exactly. We have 50 years of computer driven exponential growth and not a fucking thing is better for us. We don’t work less, travel more, be richer, live a better life, or have a better future for the planet. It should make everyone anti-capitalist.
Data I’ve seen suggests otherwise. Care to engage with me so that we can figure out where the discrepancy lies?
You’re joking, right? A peasant in the 1200s would work less than a regular person today.
Do you think an average person in 13th century had a better quality of life than an average person living in the 21st century?
In many aspects, yes, they did lead a more fulfilling life.
Free market Capitalism is the greatest economic system to ever exist.
What free market? All I have ever known is corporate socialism. Subsidize business with taxpayer dollars. Regulatory capture to prevent competitors from entering the market.
You are on Lemmy.world pal, I left that instance because it’s too neo liberal and right leaning for my taste… Are you by any chance a american because unless you post in Lemmy.ml all the time I can’t really imagine that from a european perspective! If you count the facists from Hexbear and Lemmingrad that you instance defederated from as left (which they really aren’t by the original definition of the left/right devide) it might be but I think unless you try to spill neo liberal garbage the backlash will probably be limited tbh!
Have you seen those colorful people on hexbear? Quite the echo chamber.
Unnecessary.
Be a centrist or GTFO
How much of a 14 year old do you have to be to take time out of your day to post this shit? Get a fucking life.
I thought it’s actually quite funny, besides doesn’t really take more than a minute or two? You can still have a life and post shitty memes :D
Who tf cares? Tired of seeing braindead takes that people double down on
Reddit was leftist not long ago. Not really leftist, just a bit left leaning. In my communities that changed drastically from 2020 and on. When I stopped using it a couple of months ago, my favourite subs were already mainly right wing.
What subreddits were your favorites? Genuinely curious because as a moderately right leaning person all I see is extremely leftist, and even moderately left leaning people are ostracized from Reddit.
Had me till the end. Its people even slightly right leaning who are ostracized.
